X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has removed free access to its productivity-focused TweetDeck platform. Now rebranded as XPro, the platform is only available as a perk in the X Premium subscription service.
A support account for a company called X posted on July 3 that a change is coming and that in 30 days users must be verified – or pay /month on desktop or on Android or iOS for X Premium – to access the “new, improved version” of XPro.
Some of XPro’s listed features already exist in TweetDeck, while new perks include advanced search, continue to watch a post’s video while scrolling through XPro, and choose to see top posts or posts Latest posts in columns.
The X support post notes that Teams functionality will be unavailable and “restored in the next few weeks”, but it’s unclear if that will happen. X did not immediately respond to this information.
This is the latest in a series of changes to Twitter, now X, after Elon Musk acquired it in October 2022. Under Mr. Musk’s leadership, the company introduced a subscription program and a new verification system before removing the Twitter branding and most recently changing the X app icon for some reason.
The company Twitter previously paid million in 2011 to buy TweetDeck, then a third-party desktop client popular with proficient users of the social networking platform. But the idea of limiting TweetDeck to only paying users may not be Mr. Musk’s alone – a month before Musk made his initial bid for the social networking platform, a code leak. in March 2022 showed that Twitter was considering adding TweetDeck to its Twitter Blue subscription perks.
Currently, visiting TweetDeck’s old URL (tweetdeck.twitter.com) will redirect users to X’s homepage with a pop-up prompting them to sign up for X Premium. Going to Xpro.com leads to a completely different company.